John O’Connor Bio

John O’ Connor was born in Westfield, Massachusetts. He develops his drawings through idiosyncratic systems, making visual what is ordinarily invisible. He begins each drawing with a subject of interest and through haphazard research collects data and begins to experiment with it. He completes one part of the drawing, responds to what he’s put down in a Rube Goldbergian way, and continues until the drawing is complete. Chance is an important element of the process, eliminating a purely aesthetic and personal approach. The constantly evolving systems that O’Connor devises to construct the works exist alongside the final image so that his process becomes a visual element of the work; the concept of the drawing and its formal elements are represented simultaneously.

“Raymond Queneau, cofounder of Oulipo, once described the cult writer Raymond Roussel, renowned for his perplexing compositional methods, as one who ‘joins the mathematician’s delirium to the poet’s logic.’ I could say the same about John O’Connor. It’s as if Roussel, channeled by O’Connor, had discovered the Internet and decided to make illuminated pages from his findings.” (Bruce Pearson, Bomb Magazine)

COLLECTIONS
The Museum of Modern Art, New York, NY (Gift of the Rothschild Foundation)
The New Museum (Gift of the Altoids Curiously Strong Collection)
The Whitney Museum of American Art
Southern Methodist University (Gift of Werner Kramarsky)
Weatherspoon Art Museum, NC
Westfield State College, Westfield, MA
Asheville Museum of Art, NC
Montgomery Museum of Art, AL
Zimmerli Museum of Art of Rutgers, NJ
City Museum of Orlando, FL